‘Thought I might contact the EMFs,’ she’d said idly to Rollo. ‘Though God knows how.’
‘That awful bunch,’ he replied. And he was right, of course – the EMFs were awful, though Miriam would never have said as much to Edith. The group was given this moniker at school because they read everything by E. M. Forster and discussed it at length in cafés on Finchley Road, drinking lemon tea and smoking cigarettes. When Edith first fell in with them, Ian and Miriam were thrilled (Ian more so) – the intellectual set! Edith was full of literary zeal, so taken by Howards End and A Room with a View, Maurice and Where Angels Fear to Tread, that she travelled by train to Firenze and San Gimignano (with Rollo as her rather Forster-ish chaperone, Miriam had insisted), writing furiously in her diary while Rollo listened to pop music through headphones which appeared to be surgically attached to his head. The EMFs turned out to be very up themselves indeed, pretentious and competitive, especially Electra, whom Miriam had been sure was bulimic and who got a car for her seventeenth birthday.
Miriam preferred Christy from across the road – a few years older than Edith, who liked playing hairdressers and watching TV, and with whom Edith had a sisterly, nonchalant relationship. Last-minute sleepovers welcomed by her delightfully laissez-faire Spanish mother, and after-school teas in rumpled uniforms. These days, Christy has two tiny daughters, aged two and four, and a house in Golders Green.
Miriam had gone there a few days back. Christy was kind to her, of course, made her tea (more tea), handed her tissues, and apologised to Miriam – she hadn’t heard from Edith in years. And then there was the awkward silence when Miriam became tearful. She is growing used to those, too.
‘It worked out for you, all this,’ Miriam said in a watery voice, sitting at Christy’s pock-marked farmhouse table. Her fingers traced the grooves in the wood. ‘It could have worked out for Edith, that’s what I keep thinking. For Edith and Jonti.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Christy said. ‘She was awfully critical of him. Edith’s much more ambitious than Jonti.’
The bell rings above Jonti’s shop door, which is too minimalist to have a sign, and as it closes behind her, the roar of the buses outside is silenced. They plough up and down this thoroughfare, past frayed gold velvet chaises longues and Fifties Formica tables, tasselled lamp shades, beaten leather club chairs and flaking green-painted dressers – the wares of the antique shops that flank Chamberlayne Road.
Inside, she is greeted by the smell of sawdust and linseed, warmed through the broad shop windows. She runs a hand over one cabinet – oak, she guesses – and admires its slick surface and the triangular joints which lattice together like fingers. Jonti’s style is Shaker with something entirely his own. Blocky wooden rectangles with small pegs for knobs like blinking, honest eyes in a quiet face. Dressers without curls or pelmets. Stoic tables. Miriam is astonished at the craftsmanship. He has built all this from nothing. If only Edith could have had more faith.
‘Jonti,’ she says as he enters from the back, and she is overcome with fondness for him. He has a slight stoop, is wiping his hands on the back pockets of his trousers, and wears a ridiculous beanie hat in grey wool. It is not that he is without affectation (the very location of his shop is an affectation), more that he is without guile. Jonti doesn’t have a ‘side’ – he is as plain as his furniture.
‘Mrs … Lady Hind,’ he says, checking his hands before holding one out to her.
‘Miriam, please, Jonti,’ and she ignores his hand to hug him about the shoulders.
He had been a resident of her kitchen for long enough, an extra son when he and Edith were eighteen and going about together. When he was around – and he was around a lot – the atmosphere had a good-natured calm to it. He would lean against her kitchen worktop, his hands in the pockets of his mustard cords, and say, ‘Anything you want peeling, Mrs H?’ Or joke around on the computer with Rollo, waiting for Edith to get ready.
She liked Edith when she was with Jonti; it was as if he planed down her sharper edges. Edith would rush down the stairs in a great pummelling of feet, breathless and lively, saying, ‘We’re off out, Mum,’ dragging Jonti away by the arm, and Miriam would shout after them, ‘Have fun, you two.’
Ian, of course, viewed Jonti as a dropout, and it was true he smoked a lot of marijuana (or ‘blow’ as Edith and Rollo referred to it). He was a couple of years older, was training even then to be a joiner, as if rejecting his private school education, though that had been in the overtly liberal vein: children of singers and artists, no uniforms, and everyone calling the teachers by their first names.